Review No.165: 360

The first time I saw Fernando Meirelles' stunning City of God I was transfixed by this study of Brazilian gang life and the movie ended up being crowned my favourite of less decade. Meirelles followed this up by helming The Constant Gardener which saw Rachel Weisz scoop a Supporting Actress Oscar and now he reunites with the actress for new multi-lingual drama 360. The film, which is written by Peter Morgan of The Queen and Frost/Nixon fame, sees Weisz play an unhappy housewife to Jude Law's businessman with her cheating on him while he considers spending the night with a high class prostitute. Laura the wife of Weisz's lover leaves him when she finds out about him and decides travel back to America where on the plane she meets Anthony Hopkins' recovering alcoholic who is desperately searching for his daughter who ran away from home years ago. Also on the plane is Ben Foster's recently released convict who was arrested as a sex offender and catches the eye of Laura as their plane is grounded due to heavy snow the two almost have an illicit encounter but he brushes her off. We also see that Law's prostitute is getting into deep water with a known Mafia crime lord who hires her for a night while her sister and his henchman Sergei meet and fall for each other. Finally we find Sergei's wife Valentina falling out of love with him as she catches the eye of her dentist boss but as he's a devout Muslim the two are destined not to end up together a problem she vocalises at an AA meeting that Hopkins' character just happens to attend.

Watching 360 I felt that Alejandro González Iñárritu had to be involved in some capacity as the film reminded me strongly of his back catalogue especially Babel and Amores Perros. At least those films though kept all of their plot strands equal throughout the course of the film because in the case of 360 you pretty much only get to spend twenty or so minutes with one character and its on to the next one. That's not too bad when it involves the very disinteresting marital rifts between Law and Weisz's married couple however Anthony Hopkins' character, simply known as Older Man, is an intriguing creation who deserves a lot more time on screen given the calibre of the actor that is playing him. Similarly Ben Foster, who has mastered the art of playing the creepy loner, is great as a sex offender trying to make amends for his past crimes but is tempted in while in airport full of families. The problem with the majority of the characters is that Morgan never really brings them to life and seems far more obsessed with pointing out the stories that connect all of us across the globe rather than giving us any reason to care about them. The piece is universally well acted,  as well as Hopkins and Foster I enjoyed Jamel Debbouze as the Algerian dentist, however the cast are fighting a losing battle in a film that essentially calls for them to say their lines before exiting stage left. Morgan and Meirelles try desperately to keep all their plates spinning at once but ultimately there's porcelain all over the floor by the time the end credits roll. There's no denying that the acting in 360 is top notch but everything else leads a lot to be desired which is a shame seeing as this is from the man who bought me my film of the last decade but I can safely say that at the end of the 2010s his latest movie will not feature in my list at all.

Verdict: Incredibly well-acted but lacking in all the other areas 360's cast try their best with the material they're given but ultimately there's too much going on so I can only award this 5/10

Review No.138: Act of Valor

In my last review, of Strippers Vs. Werewolves, I mentioned that none of the cast realised they were in a comedy and I think that goes double for my next film Act of Valor in that it wasn't intended to be a comedy in the first place. Act of Valor's unique selling point is that the actors portraying the Navy SEALs in this film aren't actually actors at all but real members of the navy whose identities have been protected as the cast list only reveals the names of the other players in the film. Act of Valor has some interesting statistics such as that it had the biggest budget for a film that doesn't have any star names attached to it while the first promo for it was put at the start of the Battlefield 3 video game which doesn't surprise me as directors Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh almost treat this like a video game most of the time. The plot, if you can call it that, involves a group of SEALs tasked with retrieving a rather attractive Latina CIA agent from the hands of an evil Russian drug kingpin who also has plans to blow up parts of the world with suicide vests which are specially-made due to the ball-bearings system that they operate, I'm seriously not making this up. Obviously all the SEALs have their own stereotypical identities one is about to become a father, another used to be a fighter while the narrator of the piece Lt. Rourke is seemingly a bit of a loner. The SEALs rescue CIA agent Morales with ease however they then set about on their next mission involving more terrorists this time in Somalia however they are warned by their commander not to strike straight away as he doesn't want another Black Hawk Down on his hands.

Of course the commander needn't have worried as Act of Valor is never going to trouble Black Hawk Down in terms of Somalia-set war movies and indeed I found almost insulting that that got a mention in this joke of a war film. I use joke in the very sense of the word as at times I felt I was watching a spoof of the recent 'war on terror' movies the best way to describe it was as a live action Team America as the seven SEALs make their way through various countries, blowing parts of them up as they go along I'm just surprised that none of them uttered a 'you're welcome!' before they hopped onto their submarine. The unintentional hilarity reached its peak in a scene in which one of the marines dies after leaping onto a grenade to stop it exploding which is shot in a slow motion with sad music playing over the top of the entire scene. Sometimes using non-actors in films does work however that isn't true of Act of Valor whose cast mainly just shout things at each other such as 'SECURE THE BRIDGE' and even in the more sensitive scenes in which they're meant to allow their characters to develop they instead just spout out a lot of expositional lines which I suppose is also the fault of screenwriter Kurt Johnstad. Even the actual actors, who mainly portray the bad guys or the CIA agents, are rubbish and are mainly tasked with playing clichéd foreigners such as the evil Arab or the cunning Soviet. I think I enjoyed Act of Valor more than I should've done mainly due to the fact that I was entertained by just how bad it was from the acting to the script to the scene upon scene of random shooting the only thing I took out of it was that navy SEALs are on the whole generally quite stupid. I personally believe there's room to do a spoof movie based on Act of Valor, sort of a Hot Shots! for the new millennium, it's just a shame that Leslie Nielsen has already left us as he would've made an excellent commander.

Verdict: Really bad to the point of being unintentionally hilarious there's no escaping the fact that Act of Valor is a poorly-acted piece of pro-Marines propaganda which should never have gone anywhere near a cinema screen however I can't say I wasn't entertained by the awfulness of the whole endeavour so I will award it a generous 2.5/10